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The Israeli Army did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the strike. Since Israel began its bombing campaign in Gaza on May 10, the army has said that its airstrikes aim solely at militants and their infrastructure.

Over the past week, the authorities in Gaza have tested an average of 515 Palestinians daily for the virus. Only 1.9 percent of Gaza’s two million people were fully vaccinated as of Monday, according to official data, compared with 56 percent in Israel.

Unvaccinated Palestinians were crowding into schools run by the United Nations relief agency in Gaza, turning them into de facto bomb shelters. Matthias Schmale, the U.N. agency’s director of operations, said last week that those schools “could turn into mass spreaders.”

Mr. Schmale and the top World Health Organization official in Gaza, Sacha Bootsma, also said that all vaccinations had stopped when hostilities broke out, and that any vaccine supplies headed to the territory had been delayed by the closure of Gaza’s border crossings.

Since violence between Israelis and Palestinians escalated last week, at least 100 new WhatsApp groups have been formed for the express purpose of committing violence against Palestinians, according to an analysis by The New York Times and FakeReporter, an Israeli watchdog group that studies misinformation.

While social media and messaging apps have been used in the past to spread hate speech and inspire violence, these WhatsApp groups go further, researchers said. That’s because the groups are explicitly planning and executing violent acts against Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up roughly 20 percent of the population and live largely integrated lives with Jewish neighbors.

That is far more specific than past WhatsApp-fueled mob attacks in India, where calls for violence were vague and generally not targeted at individuals or businesses

Even the Stop the Steal groups in the United States that organized the Jan. 6 protests in Washington did not openly direct attacks using social media or messaging apps,

In the groups, attacks have been carefully documented, with members often gloating about taking part in the violence, according to The Times’s review. Some said they were taking revenge for rockets being fired onto Israel from militants in the Gaza Strip, while others cited different grievances. Many solicited names of Arab-owned businesses they could target next.

“It is a perfect storm of people empowered to use their own names and phone numbers to openly call for violence, and having a tool like WhatsApp to organize themselves into mobs,” said Achiya Schatz, director of FakeReporter.

Micky Rosenfeld, a spokesman for the Israeli police, said, “Police are tracking social media and monitoring movements on the ground.” He said that while Israelis have been involved in some attacks, they were largely “protecting themselves” against attacks by Palestinian citizens of Israel. He added, “Police investigations are continuing.”

One official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, added that the police had not seen similar WhatsApp groups forming among Palestinians.

Islamist movements, including Hamas, the militant Palestinian organization that controls the Gaza Strip, have long organized and recruited followers on social media but do not plan attacks on the services for fear of being discovered.

A WhatsApp spokeswoman said the messaging service was concerned by the activity from Israeli extremists. She said the company had removed some accounts of people who participated in the groups. WhatsApp cannot read the encrypted messages on its service, she added, but it has acted when accounts were reported to it for violating its terms of service.

The groups have since grown steadily in size, Mr. Schatz said. Some have become so big that they have branched off into local chapters that are dedicated to certain cities and towns. To evade detection by WhatsApp, organizers of the groups are urging people to vet new members, he said.

On one new Telegram channel that The Times reviewed, “The Revenge Troops,” people recently shared instructions for how to build Molotov cocktails and makeshift explosives. The group asked its 400 members to also provide addresses of Arab-owned businesses that could be targeted.

In another group with just under 100 members, people shared photos of guns, knives and other weapons as they discussed engaging in street combat in mixed Jewish-Arab cities. Another new WhatsApp group was named “The unapologetic right-wing group.”

“We destroyed them, we left them in pieces,” said one person in “The Revenge Troops” Telegram channel, alongside a photo showing smashed car windows. In a different group, a video was uploaded of black-clad Jewish youths stopping cars on an unnamed street and asking drivers if they were Jewish or Arab.

We beat “the enemy car-by-car,” said a comment posted underneath the video, using an expletive.

“Our government is too weak to do what is necessary, so we take it into our own hands,” wrote one person in a WhatsApp group dedicated to the city of Ramle in central Israel. “Now that we have organized, they can’t stop us.”

Hamas has launched more than 4,000 rockets at southern Israel — the vast majority shot down by Israeli defenses, falling short of their targets or landing in unpopulated areas. That steady onslaught appeared to slow overnight, with Israeli military officials recording 70 rockets between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m.

Israel has targeted around 1,000 sites in Gaza that it claims hold significant military value, according to Israeli military officials. However, the campaign has also caused widespread destruction of homes and critical infrastructure, displacing tens of thousands from their homes and causing dire shortages of water and medical supplies.

While fighting continued for an 11th day, it appeared to ease as the two sides indicated that they could soon reach an agreement.

Since the start of the conflict 11 days ago, Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 200 Palestinians, including over 60 children, according to the Gaza health ministry. The Israeli military said that more than 130 of those killed were combatants. Hamas rocket attacks have killed more than a dozen people in Israel, including two children, according to the Israeli authorities.

The shape of a possible cease-fire deal between Hamas and Israel started to come into clearer focus on Thursday, even as diplomats and Middle East experts cautioned that the last moments before any agreement are fraught with risk and uncertainty.

Under growing international pressure, Israel and Hamas are said to be edging toward a cease-fire that could end their deadliest conflict since a 2014 war. But the history of Israeli-Palestinian hostilities is littered with agreements that have failed to resolve the underlying disputes.

They are expecting a return to United States support for a two-state solution that Palestinians would consider viable.

Rolling back other moves by Mr. Trump, however, would be more complicated, like reopening a Palestinian diplomatic mission in Washington.

Should Mr. Trump win a second term, the Palestinians see no good options.

Ultimately, many analysts say, Mr. Abbas may have to eat crow and re-engage the Trump administration, ideally with some sort of face-saving diplomatic cover like the intervention of a multilateral institution.

Difficult as it may be to believe now, Mr. Abbas was quite optimistic about the Trump administration in its first few months,

But those hopes were quickly dashed, and the administration’s treatment of the Palestinians became a growing nightmare of aid cuts, affronts and insults.

Allowing the reopening of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s diplomatic mission in Washington or restoring much of the aid to projects that directly benefited the Palestinian Authority would require Mr. Biden to overcome a number of legal obstacles, some of which might require Congressional approval.

“These are all possible but they would require heavy political lifting,”

Some Palestinians support renewed efforts to revive negotiations with Israel. Others want the Palestinian Authority to dissolve itself, forcing Israel to take responsibility for their lives

“I feel like we’re in a very dark tunnel with no light at the end,” he said.

Let’s start with the obvious: Israel has a right to defend itself, rescue the hostages, arrest and prosecute Hamas and engage in lawful armed combat with its enemy.

People claiming the Hamas attack is the ‘violence of the oppressed’ are deluded. Hamas rules Gaza like a mafia state: its operatives walk around neighbourhoods in twos, dressed in dark suits, prying into people’s business. They run the place on a mixture of terror, public service provision and the kudos of their fighters.

They are feared but there is widespread disrespect for them, especially among secular and nationalist sections of the population.

Paradoxically, the western ‘anti-imperialists’ trying to apologise for the terror attack, and the Israeli right calling for retribution against civilians, both need to identify Hamas with the Palestinian population of Gaza in order to justify violence. But there is no basis for doing so.

The fact that a violent action takes place in the context of a wider oppression does not make it either (a) just (b) lawful under international law or c) effective in pursuit of social justice.

In this case, Hamas’s act of terror looks set to achieve the opposite.

What does Hamas want?

Hamas has offered a truce and asked for negotiations, stating that it has ‘achieved its objective’. If so, it’s logical to conclude that the immediate objective was to demonstrate proof-of-concept of an unstoppable pogromist terror. Do as we ask or we do this again, might be a fair summary.

The wider aim, according to numerous experts, is to force Hamas and Iran back into the power-broking process in the Middle East region, paralysing Saudi-Israeli rapprochement.

The firm view of the Islamic Republic is that the governments that are gambling on normalizing relations with the Zionist regime will suffer losses. Defeat awaits them…Today, the situation of the Zionist regime is not a situation that encourages closeness to it. They [other governments] should not make this mistake. The usurper [Zionist] regime is coming to an end.

Hamas could only achieve the aim of ending Saudi-Israeli rapprochement with an attack designed to trigger massive retribution, risking a regional all-out war.

there’s a line in Khamenei’s 3 October speech that, in retrospect looks explanatory: Thus, [the Zionists] are filled with grudge. They are filled with anger! Of course, the Quran exclaims: “Say, “die of your rage!” (3:119). That’s right. Be angry, and die of your rage. And this will happen. They are dying. With God’s help, this matter of ‘die of your rage’ is happening now as regards the Zionist regime.

‘Die of your rage’ might actually be a good summary of what Hamas intends Israel to now do.

Enraged by the barbarity of the attacks, Israel unleashes unprecedented collective punishment against Gaza, triggering both Hezbollah and West Bank militants to join in the fight; this in turn prompts a wave of anti-Semitic demonstrations in western cities, and draws the USA into a regional quagmire, testing the limits of American support for Israel

Meanwhile combat losses, and retribution over the complete failure of Netanyahu’s strategy of ‘managing’ the conflict, raise political divisions in Israeli society to the point where its democracy fails.

In a context where both Russia and China have complex hybrid destabilisation operations going on in western democracies, and where the Brics+ project is pursuing the active decomposition of the rules-based order, this objective does not look as mad as at first sight.

the ‘multipolar world’ turns out not to be one of peaceful coexistence, but characterised by extreme conflicts and genocide.

In pursuit of systemic competition Beijing and Moscow are scraping at every open wound in the body geopolitic

it’s what you get when you purposefully dismantle an international order based on treaties and explicit rules. And where elites in Russia, the USA, Brasil and parts of Europe are openly experimenting with ethno-nationalist politics.

Chaos, then, is a feature of multipolarity, not a bug.

Israel has signalled its military objective is to destroy Hamas. From my experience in Gaza I would say: that is possible.

But be in no doubt. It will need a sustained urban combat operation, a long-term military occupation, massive loss of civilian life, an existential refugee crisis in Sinai, and the diversion of US-supplied ammunition and resources from Ukraine.

Attempting it with a largely conscript/reservist army, full of recently mobilised and enraged soldiers? Again it’s worth remembering Khamenei’s exhortation to Israelis to ‘die of your rage’.

The very impossibility of all these outcomes shows why we need an internationally mediated peace, alongside a functional two-state solution, which allows the people of Gaza to live in peace, exercise democracy and travel across borders.

not only will liberal sympathy for Israel evaporate, but the Muslim minorities in some Western countries will be radicalised.

Typically, from my experience, combat in Gaza takes the following form. There is a street with children playing at one end; in the middle it is eerily deserted; at the other end is the IDF and above is an IDF drone. But there is no front line. The mujahedeen are in tunnels, popping up to take sniper shots or lay IEDs at night, and only committing ATGMs once a vehicle comes into view. The only front line is, for most of the time, between the IDF and Palestinian civilians.

Both sides risk miscalculating. Hamas does not care what happens to Palestinian civilians in Gaza, many of whom hate Hamas.

But there is a danger of miscalculation for Israel too. Netanyahu’s far-right government completely missed the threat, actively stoked tensions in the West Bank and Al Aqsa, and could easily now double down on a self-destructive course.

Ultimately, you cannot hold two million people in an open air prison without a gaoler to keep order. If Hamas can’t do it, the IDF will have to be a permanent occupation force, or it will have to install the PA, or the UN will have to send a stabilisation force.

Danger of miscalculation

The Brics+ ideology

The Gaza crisis is the latest example of how the Russian/Chinese ‘multipolar world’ project works in practice. It doesn’t matter whether there is a chain of command that goes Moscow→Tehran→Hamas. There is a chain of understanding – seize every opportunity to militarise all conflict; exploit every unexpected breakthrough; make all violence symbolic; weaponise the information space and push conflict into the heartlands of ‘imperialism’.

the Brics+ ideology. Its central tenets are that a multipolar world is better than the charter system; that universalism and international law are over; that the West no longer has the right to use the structures of international governance to normalise concepts like democracy or human rights; and that everything that disorganises the rules-based order is progressive, even when carried out by reactionary political forces.

Arab nationalism no longer looks like the dominant ideology on the demonstrations we’ve seen in Sydney, London and NYC. Alongside it there’s a mixture of Islamism plus the ‘decolonisation’ agenda of postmodernist academia.

For the past two years, during the Ukraine war, this incipient red-brown ideology has been mostly contained:

with this conflict there is now a danger that the masses turn up, and are corralled into this emergent fusion of far-left/far-right politics.

I’ve spent the period post-2016 trying to equip the democratic left to defeat this ideology. It’s not about being ‘anti-woke’, or apologising for colonialism: it means teaching people that a cocktail of anti-humanism, anti-universalism and anti-rationality is a route to excusing the totalitarian states in Russia and China, and – now – the genocidal actions of their proxies.

A case study of this is the statement issued by 31 Harvard student groups saying they ‘hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence’ – just hours after the Hamas attack began.

the global left is rapidly splitting into irreconcilable camps – as Edward Thompson recognised it would, under the influence of post-structuralism in the 1970s.

The logical implication is that Palestinians have no agency whatsoever. That Hamas murders civilians because Israel has ‘structured’ Palestinian reality to make that inevitable. For people presumably wedded to ‘decolonising’ the curriculum, it is a shockingly colonialist premise.

The logic is that Israel is responsible for everything Hamas does because its violence has ‘structured every aspect of Palestinian existence’ since the Nakba.

There are many civilisations, and none is superior or inferior to another. They are equal since each civilisation represents a unique expression of its own culture, traditions, and the aspirations of its people.

In a way, what Putin preaches is an ‘intersectionality of the peoples’: identity politics raised from the level of the individual to the level of the ethnic group.

And it turns out anti-Enlightenment leftism makes it pretty easy to converge with that view. The common assumptions are disdain for universalism, scorn for international law and human rights, repudiation of the Enlightenment (and thus liberalism, social democracy, humanistic Marxism and anarchism) and worship of any totalitarian government that delivers economic development.

This is the modern incarnation of Stalinism, and – to the surprise of nobody who has studied actual Stalinism – it has no problem seeing fascists like Hamas as the ‘agent of progress’.

we need to understand how closely this hyper-deterministic and anti-universal world view maps onto the ideology presented, for example, by Putin at Valdai last week. For Putin there is no single human civilisation, only civilisations, which must be rooted in ethnicity establish their co-existence through the survival of the fittest:

One camp, he said, is a theology. The other a tradition of active reason. The first repudiates liberalism and universalism. The second recognises its debt to liberalism and wants to make universalism consistent

The first claims international law is a sham; the second knows that, though the institutions of the rules-based order are flawed, they are better than chaos.

that you can stand with the Israeli people under attack while simultaneously standing up for the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.

Those flaunting their joy at the murder of Israeli civilians need to understand the licence this creates in the minds of rightwing ethno-nationalists in our own society. What Hamas did to the kids of Kfar Azar, the far right wants to do to you.

Though Ms. Ocasio-Cortez struggled early on to articulate her views on the Middle East and has never visited the region, the 34-year-old congresswoman has come to embody that generational shift.

She uses terms like “apartheid” and “oppression,” loathed by Israel’s defenders, to describe the treatment of Palestinians. Last week, she called the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel lobby and one of Mr. Torres’s top campaign donors, “racist and bigoted.”

“This is pursuing a proven and failed strategy,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said in a recent radio interview. “So why do it, why kill kids, why put people in danger, why perpetuate these cycles when we’ve done it so many times, and it’s never kept us safe?”

Mr. Torres has reserved special vitriol for the Democratic Socialists of America, the small but influential leftist group that has pushed for boycotts of Israel and counts Ms. Ocasio-Cortez as a member. In an interview, he said that the D.S.A. was trying to infiltrate the Democratic Party “to impose the ideological litmus tests on Israel” and “cleanse” those who disagree with them. He said he was on a “publicly stated mission” to undermine it.

“You can see how hard Alexandria is trying to listen compassionately across the lines of this conflict,” said Brad Lander, the left-leaning New York City comptroller who is the highest-ranking Jewish city official. “I’m not saying anyone is doing it perfectly, but there is a difference between trying and not trying.”

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who did not agree to an interview, met in Washington last month with the families of Jewish hostages kidnapped by Hamas. She has repeatedly condemned the group and supports a two-state solution shunned by some on the left. And at a time when many liberal Jews feel they are being abandoned by the left, she has warned about “disgusting and unacceptable” antisemitism in a post to 8.4 million Instagram followers, saying, “No movement of integrity should tolerate it.”

“I do worry that the next generation is increasingly indoctrinated with anti-Israel hate so virulent that it renders them indifferent to the coldblooded murder of Jews in Israel,”

His views are no surprise to those who watched Mr. Torres, a proud college dropout and defender of public housing, evolve from left-aligned political upstart to more traditional Democratic congressman

It was his first trip abroad, and Mr. Torres said witnessing both the fragility of the frontier and Tel Aviv’s openness to gay life left him with “profound empathy” for Israel and a commitment to a two-state solution.

“The attacks by Hamas didn’t happen in a vacuum,” said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, citing the 56-year Israeli occupation. Both sides are responsible, added former president Barack Obama, urging us to “take in the whole truth” of the conflict.

This is not a political conflict, we remind the world, but an outbreak of evil. Just like ISIS, we note, recalling the terrible devastation caused by the necessary American assault in Mosul and Raqqa. 

No, we patiently explain, the massacre was not in response to anything Israel does but to what Israel is

yes, the suffering of innocent Gazans deserves the world’s urgent humanitarian attention, but not at the expense of moral clarity about the justness of this war.

Yes, many Jews readily acknowledge, Israel bears its share of the blame for this hundred-year conflict. So do Palestinian leaders, who rejected every peace offer ever put on the table. 

What may well be the most horrific massacre of our time, outdoing even the atrocities of ISIS, has resulted in the unprecedented popularity of the Palestinian cause.

increasingly, we sense that we are talking to ourselves. The post-religious West, which substitutes the ideological rhetoric of academia for a genuine language for evil, doesn’t understand the old Jewish language we are speaking.

No, Israel is not a paragon of virtue. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have spent this last year protesting every week against the anti-democratic Netanyahu government

To leave a genocidal regime on our border would be a betrayal of the founding ethos of Israel as a safe refuge for the Jewish people. It would be the beginning of our unraveling.

Over and over we repeat what we’d assumed was self-evident: One side seeks to maximize civilian casualties, the other side to minimize them.

Harnevo mocked Cosgrave for tweeting, on the day of the massacre, a chart comparing the number of Palestinians and Israelis killed over the last 15 years. “You see Paddy, what happened on October 7 was not another data point on your f*king charts. It was something else, unbearable.” 

there are moments when we must risk going alone. We know that the longer the fighting in Gaza lasts, even our friends will begin to pressure us to relent. We must resist that pressure and not fear the consequences. 

During the Second Intifada, when the IDF fought suicide bombers in Palestinian towns and villages, an exasperated Kofi Anan, then secretary-general of the UN, demanded: “Can the whole world be wrong and only Israel is right?” Israelis unhesitatingly replied: Absolutely.

Speaking at the gravesite, Yonadav’s brother called on the government to resist world pressure and persevere. He invoked Israel’s first prime minister: “David Ben-Gurion said that it doesn’t matter what the gentiles say, only what the Jews do.”

Israelis across the political spectrum agree that the regime of Oct. 7 must be destroyed. Like Ben-Gurion, we are willing to pay the bitter price of being alone.

The tragedy of the Middle East is that this is a clash of right versus right. That does not excuse Hamas’s massacre and savagery or Israel’s leveling of entire neighborhoods in Gaza, but underlying the conflict are certain legitimate aspirations that deserve to be fulfilled.

Israelis deserve their country, forged by refugees in the shadow of the Holocaust, and they have built a high-tech economy that largely empowers women and respects gay people, while giving its Palestinian citizens more rights than most Arab nations give their citizens

Likewise, Palestinians deserve a country, freedom and dignity — and they shouldn’t be subjected to collective punishment

A great majority of those killed have been women and children, according to Gaza’s Hamas-controlled Health Ministry, and one gauge of the ferocity and indiscriminate nature of some airstrikes is that more than 100 United Nations staffers have been killed, which the U.N. says is more than in any conflict since its founding

Perhaps that’s because, as an Israeli military spokesman put it early in the conflict, “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”

If there is a path forward toward peace — whether in two states or one state — it will begin with all of us moving beyond stereotypes. Israelis are not the same as Netanyahu, and Palestinians are not the same as Hamas.

That was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy, his way of avoiding a Palestinian state, and it worked for a time — the way a pressure cooker works, until it explodes.

The third myth is found on both sides of the conflict and is approximately: It’s too bad we have to engage in this bloodshed, but the people on the other side understand only violence.

Hamas indeed understands only violence, and it has been brutal to Israelis and Palestinians alike — but Hamas and Palestinians are not the same, just as violent settlers in the West Bank do not represent all Israelis.

so far, I’m afraid that the ferocity and lack of precision in Israel’s attack has fulfilled Hamas’s goal of escalating the Palestinian issue and changing the Middle East dynamic

In that sense, Hamas may be winning.

Five weeks into this war, I don’t see evidence that Israel’s military has degraded Hamas in a significant way, but it has killed vast numbers of civilians, put the Palestinian struggle on top of the global agenda, dissipated the initial torrent of sympathy for Israel, prompted people around the globe to march for Palestine, distracted attention from kidnapped Israelis and ruptured any possibility soon of Israel’s normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia.

three myths inflaming the debate

I’m exasperated by people whose hearts bleed for only one side, or who say about the toll on the other: “It’s tragic, but ….” No “buts.” Unless you believe in human rights for Jews and for Palestinians, you don’t actually believe in human rights.

So what accounts for the dogged support Berlin extends to Israel in its war against Hamas? You must look beyond immediate crisis. Germany’s foreign policy establishment has suffered a deep shock, indeed the second one, after last year’s realisation that Russia could not be appeased by diplomatic overtures, pipeline deals and “change through trade”

When Israel used excessive violence in earlier Gaza wars, Germany raised public concerns. Berlin has constantly criticised the expansion of settlements. More than a decade ago, the then foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel, called the situation in Hebron (in the occupied West Bank) “apartheid”. Berlin has supported the Palestinian Authority with over €1bn, and is among the top donors to Unwra, the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees.

Similarly, Germany had pushed for diplomacy to deal with Iran’s nuclear and regional ambitions.

Then the Gazan member of Iran’s axis of resistance attacked Israel on 7 October. The Jewish state is trapped in a pincer movement between Hamas and Hezbollah – and the possibility of a wider war. This is an existential crisis for Israel.

The cornerstones of Germany’s foreign policy have crumbled. Engagement with Russia and Iran has failed. This is the view from Berlin: these two powers must be stopped, and that includes the destruction of Hamas. This is the reason for Germany’s staunch support of Israel’s war against Hamas, notwithstanding the deep distrust of Netanyahu – and the wish to see him gone as soon as hostilities end.

Also, college students aren’t full-fledged grown-ups. They do need guidance, and they benefit from it.

“The campus protests of the late 1960s sought in part to dismantle the in loco parentis role that colleges and universities had held in American life. But the past two decades have been shaped by a reversal of that, as institutions have sought to reconstruct this role in response to what students and parents paying enormous sums for their education have seemed to want.”

For us professors, the surrogate-parent paradigm means regular emails and other reminders from administrators that we should be taking our students’ temperatures, watching for glimmers of distress, intervening proactively and fashioning accommodations, especially if there has been some potentially discomfiting global, national or local news event

where does reasonable consideration end and unreasonable coddling begin? And what do validation and comfort have to do with learning?

Arguably, everything. If you’re not mentally healthy, you’ll be harder pressed to do the reading, writing and critical thinking at the core of college work

many schools have encouraged that mind-set, casting themselves as stewards of students’ welfare, guarantors of their safety, places of refuge, precincts of healing.

But are we responsibly preparing them for the world after college — and for the independence, toughness, resourcefulness and resilience it will almost surely demand of them — when we too easily dole out A’s, too readily grant extensions, too gingerly deliver critiques, and too quickly wonder and sound alarms about any disturbance in the atmosphere?

We keep witnessing episodes of students taking their colleges to task in ways that smack of entitlement and fragility and are out of bounds

Hamline’s president, Fayneese Miller, defended that sequence of events by saying that to not weigh academic freedom against a “debt to the traditions, beliefs and views of students” is a “privileged reaction.”

That’s a troubling assertion, as Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic: “If you don’t want your traditions, beliefs or views challenged, then don’t come to a university, at least not to study anything in the humanities or the social sciences.”

The school is a merchant, a kind of department store, or so a student could easily assume, based on the come-ons from affluent colleges competing with one another for applicants. They peddle tantalizing dining options, themed living arrangements, diverse amusements. They assign students the role of discerning customers. And the customer is always right.

But in an educational environment, that credo is all wrong, because learning means occasionally being provoked, frequently being unsettled and regularly being yanked outside of your comfort zone,

most students can handle that dislocation — if they’re properly prepped for it, if they’re made to understand its benefits. We shortchange them when we sell them short

Thrall was asked about his depictions of Israelis, and whether he had qualms about “humanizing the occupation.”

I don’t like the fact that the statement Nguyen signed gestured only vaguely at Hamas’s slaughter of Israeli civilians. In calling off his Friday evening appearance, 92NY, a Jewish organization, was playing by rules much of the left established, privileging sensitivity to traumatized communities ahead of the robust exchange of ideas.

“I was very glad to be asked that question,” Thrall told me. “Because that was absolutely the ambition of the book, to depict real people” rather than villains and saints.

if someone as evenhanded as Thrall now finds his talks being dropped, we’re in an especially repressive period. And in a time of war, particularly a war shrouded in fiercely competing narratives, free speech is more important than ever.

Thrall is not alone; in recent weeks several literary and cultural events by pro-Palestinian speakers or groups have been either scrapped or relocated.

And supporters of Israel are hardly alone in creating a censorious atmosphere; particularly on college campuses, it is Zionists who feel silenced and intimidated

Nevertheless, a commitment to free speech, like a commitment to human rights, shouldn’t depend on others reciprocating; such commitments are worth trying to maintain even in the face of unfairness

it’s also possible that population aging has something to do with it. There’s a pretty well-established literature linking youthful population bulges to elevated risk of conflict.

For example, Cincotta and Weber (2021) find that countries with a median age of 25 or less are much more likely to have revolutions:

Evidence from the 1990s reveals that countries where people aged fifteen to twenty-nine made up more than 40 percent of the adult population were twice as likely to suffer civil conflict.

Data collected from 1950 to 2000 found that countries where 35 percent or more of their adult populations comprised people aged fifteen to twenty-four were 150 percent more likely to experience an outbreak of civil conflict

, the young people crowd each other out, and this makes them mad. This effect is obviously exacerbated when the economy is stagnating. Also, simply having a lot of young men around without much to lose seems like a risk factor in and of itself.

Whether rich or poor, the countries in the Greater Middle East — I’ll throw Afghanistan and Pakistan into the mix, since they’ve also been a big locus of conflict — just don’t tend to experience much economic growth at all.

But the good news here, at least from a conflict-avoidance perspective, is that these countries are getting steadily older. There are a number of countries in the region where median age has already passed the 25-year mark:

how much things have changed

When Iran threw hundreds of thousands of soldiers against Iraq in “human wave” attacks in the 1980s, the median Iranian was just 17 years old; now, the median Iranian is in their early 30s.

Saudi Arabia got involved in the Yemen war, but was reluctant to send ground troops against the Houthis — possibly because the Houthis are formidable, but possibly because the Saudis have relatively few young people to send.

Hezbollah resides in a considerably older country than in 2006 when they attacked Israe

On the other hand, there are a number of other countries in the region that are still pretty young:

troublingly, Afghanistan, Yemen, Palestine, Iraq, and Pakistan are projected to still be below a median age of 25 a decade from now.

all of these countries are still aging at a steady clip — as are the countries that are already over 25. The fundamental reason is the big collapse in fertility rates in the Greater Middle East (and across the broader Muslim world) over the past few decades.

When Iran exploded in revolution and fought a titanic war against Iraq in the late 70s and 80s, its fertility was over 6; now it’s down to about 1.5

When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, its fertility was over 7; now, it’s below 4

I don’t want to claim that “demography is destiny” here, and it’s all too easy to look at individual countries and tell just-so stories about how aging and fertility might have affected their conflict

The old Middle East, with massive crowds of angry young people thronging the streets, ready to explode into nationalist or sectarian or revolutionary violence, is steadily disappearing, being replaced by a more sedate, aging society. Given the horrific outcomes of the last few decades, it’s hard not to see that as a good thing.

On the Israeli side, blind U.S. security guarantees have not provided a path to peace. Instead, they have provided Israel with the reassurance that it can engage in increasingly destructive efforts, such as the expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank, without any real consequences.

At the same time, Israel has become a global leader in weapons exports and boasts one of the most technologically sophisticated militaries in the world. All of these factors have created a sense among Israeli policymakers that they can indefinitely contain — physically and politically — the Palestinian question.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the recent efforts, driven by the United States, first under the Trump administration and continuing under President Biden, to pursue normalization between Israel and the Arab world. While in many ways this normalization is long overdue, it has been premised on the notion that economic incentives — and a shared regional security interest in deterring malign Iranian influence — can integrate Israel, indefinite occupation and all, into the Arab world.

This premise has been shattered — likely intentionally on Hamas’s part — by the Gaza conflict and its rapid recentering of the Palestinian cause on a global stage.

As civilian deaths in Gaza and the West Bank continue to mount, it is clear any sort of Saudi normalization agreement with Israel that does not also include substantive progress on a political solution for the Palestinian cause will be difficult to advance.

Under the Leahy laws, the United States is prohibited from providing security assistance to any unit that is credibly accused of having committed a gross violation of human rights. Unlike almost all other recipients, which are vetted along these lines before they receive assistance, for Israel the process is reversed: The assistance is provided, and the United States then waits to receive reports of violations, assessing their credibility through a process known as the Israel Leahy vetting forum, which includes consultation with the government of Israel.

To date, the forum has never come to consensus that any Israeli security force unit or soldier has committed a gross violation of human rights — despite the findings of international human rights organizations

the U.S. failure to impose accountability on Israel for such violations may provide Israel with a sense of impunity, increasing the likelihood of gross violations of human rights (including those committed by settlers against Palestinian civilians) and further breaking the trust between Israel and Palestinians that would be needed for any sort of lasting peace.

Working on the ground with the authority, I saw how the major focus of U.S. efforts was to prove to the Israel Defense Forces that their Palestinian counterparts could be trusted to take on the mission of securing Israel

Palestinian intelligence officials would be provided with target information by Israel, and Palestinian forces would be expected to take on missions previously conducted by the Israel Defense Forces to detain those targets. This effort not only undermined Palestinian support for the authority but also failed to convince the Israelis, who saw any Palestinian courts’ (correct) refusal to hold Palestinian detainees without due process as proof of a revolving door in the system.

Even worse, in 2008 and ’09, when Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, which resulted in over 1,300 Palestinian deaths in Gaza, sparked protests in the West Bank, it was the Palestinian Authority Security Forces that physically stood between demonstrators and the Israel Defense Forces. From my balcony in Ramallah, I saw this as a proof of success and reported as much to Washington at the time. In hindsight, it was perhaps the death knell for the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority in the eyes of its people.

If the United States is to continue to employ military and security assistance as a tool of its engagement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (and there are good arguments why it should not), it must change its approach significantly. One way to do this would be simply by applying the laws and policies that it applies to every other country in the world: There is no point in having leverage that could pressure Israel to cease actions that undermine peace if we refuse to even consider using it

The United States could also start conditioning its military assistance to Israel (as it does for many other recipients) on certain verifiable political conditions being met. In Israel’s case, these may include a halt to or dismantling of settlement infrastructure in the West Bank.

Another thing the U.S. might do is consider reframing its security assistance on the Palestinian side to reinforce, rather than undermine, the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority

Doing so would require structuring assistance in a way that enables Palestinian society control over its own security forces. It would also require the recognition of Palestinian statehood

I resigned from my job because I do not believe that U.S. arms should be provided in a situation if we know they are more likely than not — in the words of the Biden administration’s own guiding policy — to lead to or to aggravate the risk of human rights violations, including widespread civilian harm and death.

Nearly 30 percent of the ultra-Orthodox public now supports the idea of military service, twenty points higher than before the war,

“Something fundamental has changed here, and we don’t know what it is yet,” said Yossi Klein Halevi, an author and fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a research group in Jerusalem. “What we do know is that this is kind of a last chance for this country.”

Roughly a third of voters for Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing party, Likud, have abandoned the party since Oct. 7, according to every national poll since the attack.

Perhaps surprisingly, 70 percent of Arab Israelis now say they feel part of the state of Israel, according to a November poll by the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem-based research group. That is 22 points higher than in June and the highest proportion since the group began polling on the question two decades ago.

But for others, the scale of the Oct. 7 atrocities has left them struggling to even empathize with Gazans, let alone retain hope in a peaceful solution to the conflict.In 2018, Mr. Klein Halevi, the author, wrote a book addressed to an imagined Palestinian, “Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor,” in which he attempted to set out a vision for a shared future between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East.Since Oct. 7, Mr. Halevi said, he has found it hard to even consider what such a future looks like. An observant Jew, he still prays for Palestinians, but more from duty than empathy, he said.“I spent years explaining the Israeli narrative and absorbing the Palestinian narrative — and I tried to find a space where both could live together,” Mr. Klein Halevi said.“I don’t have that language right now,” he said. “It’s emotionally unavailable to me.”

Analysts see the most optimal outcome for Israel probably consisting of degrading Hamas’s military capabilities to prevent the group from repeating such a devastating attack. But even that limited goal is considered a formidable slog.

Hamas is rooted in the ideology that Israeli control over what it regards as Palestinians lands must be opposed by force, a tenet likely to endure, experts said.

“As long as that context is there, you will be dealing with some form of Hamas,” said Tahani Mustafa, senior Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group think tank. “To assume that you can simply uproot an organization like that is fantasy.”

The Israeli military said this week that it had killed about 8,000 Hamas fighters out of a force estimated at 25,000 to 40,000. But it is unclear how the count is being made

“They’ve been saying this for a while, that Hamas is collapsing,” Mr. Milshtein said. “But it’s just not true. Every day, we’re facing tough battles.”

The group’s top echelon are believed to be sheltering, along with most of its fighters and the remaining hostages, in deep tunnels. Although the Israeli army has said that it demolished at least 1,500 shafts, experts consider the underground infrastructure is largely intact.

The tunnels, built over 15 years, are believed to be so extensive, estimated at hundreds of miles long, that Israelis call them the Gaza Metro.

“From a professional point of view, I must give credit to their resilience,” he said. “I cannot see any signs of collapse of the military abilities of Hamas nor in their political strength to continue to lead Gaza.”

A string of Israeli assassinations of Hamas political, military and religious leaders also failed to weaken the group. It won control of Gaza in free Palestinian elections in 2006, then evicted its more moderate rival, the Palestinian Authority, in a bloody conflict the next year.

For Israel, the aim is first to dismantle the government, then to disperse the fighters and eliminate the commanders and their primary subordinates, the Israeli official said.

“The top leadership can disappear at any time because they can be killed, they can be arrested, they can be deported,” he said. “So they developed this mechanism of the easy transfer of command.”

Trying to eliminate Hamas entirely would require fighting from street to street and house to house, and Israel lacks both the time and personnel, said Elliot Chapman, a Middle East analyst with Janes, a defense analysis firm.

The Gaza fight has been compared to the campaign to wrest Mosul, Iraq, from the Islamic State less than a decade ago, but there are significant differences.

Notably, Hamas is organic to Gaza — it grew out of frustration with the mainstream factions abandoning the armed struggle against the Israeli occupation. Hamas refuses to recognize Israel, and according to its founding charter, is committed to its destruction.

Some Gazans curse Hamas, even taking to the airwaves or social media to do it, despite the organization’s history of repressing opponents. Other Gazans, however, say that they still back “the resistance,” and Hamas has long attracted support by providing services like schools and clinics.

“The right way to think about it is to degrade the organization to the point that it is no longer a sustainable threat,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a retired C.I.A. officer who specialized in Middle East counterterrorism.

“You cannot just have a strategy of killing everybody,” he added. “You have to have that day-after scenario.”

The comparison from Gessen’s essay, which caused such uproar, closely echoes a passage from Arendt’s correspondence written from Jerusalem in 1955 to her husband Heinrich Blücher, which is far more damning:

“The galut-and-ghetto mentality is in full bloom. And the idiocy is right in front of everyone’s eyes: Here in Jerusalem I can barely go for a walk, because I might turn the wrong corner and find myself ‘abroad’, ie, in Arab territory. Essentially it’s the same everywhere. On top of that, they treat the Arabs, those still here, in a way that in itself would be enough to rally the whole world against Israel.”

Within the culture of German memory politics the Holocaust is treated as singular; it is understood as a historical exception

his exception-to-history mentality has the effect of placing the Holocaust outside of history altogether, which allows the German government to espo

By making the comparison between a Nazi-occupied ghetto and Gaza before 7 October, Gessen is making a political argument meant to invoke historical memory and draw attention to concepts like genocide, crimes against humanity and “never again”, which emerged out of the second world war.

For Arendt, the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie was the cornerstone of the modern nation-state, in which political laws were governed by the private interests of businessmen who had found it necessary to take over the apparatus of the state in order to deploy the military in their colonial ventures

In exile in Paris from 1933 until she was interned in 1940, she worked to help Jewish youth escape to Palestine and even went there in 1935 with Youth Aliyah.

he said she only wanted to do Jewish work to help the Jewish people, because her mother had taught her that when one is attacked as a Jew one must fight back as a Jew

She was attacked at the conference for calling for a rejection of Ben-Gurion’s vision

in 1948, she joined Albert Einstein and Sidney Hook among others in signing a letter published in the New York Times to protest against Menachem Begin’s visit to America, comparing his “Freedom” party “to the organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist Parties”.

Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize. She would be cancelled in Germany today for her political position on Israel and opinions about contemporary Zionism, which she remained critical of from 1942 until her death in 1975

while antisemitism as an ideology was central to the organization of the masses, it was not the only political factor at play in her account.

Arendt was critical of the nation-state of Israel from its founding, in part because she was worried that the state would exhibit the worst tendencies of the European nation-state

It was this co-option of the nation, and transformation of the nation into a nation-state by private economic interests that lay at the heart of her understanding. And what she emphasized – and was criticized for – was the argument that antisemitism was being used politically by the nation-state in order to further its political and economic interests.

Of course Eichmann had been antisemitic, she argued, but his hatred of the Jewish people was not his primary motivation. Instead, she argued it was his commonplace hubris that made him want to ascend the ranks of the Third Reich

She argued that this was the banality of evil, and defined the banality of evil as the inability to imagine the world from the perspective of another

All of which is to say, it is necessary that we as human beings be able to imagine the world from the perspective of another to prevent evil from happening, and to stand up to evil when we are confronted with it

right now Germany’s resolution forbids it

This moral obligation to compare means two things: that Germany is not allowed to continue to treat the Jewish people or Jewish history as an exception to the rule in order to justify their political support of Israel; and that all people have a right to exist freely everywhere, regardless of where they appeared in the world by chance of birth

The question she wrote in her notebook as she thought about how Germany should remember the war was this: “Is there a way of thinking that is not tyrannical?”

What Arendt meant by banality, arguing that it was the inability to imagine the world from the perspective of another, was that people had gone along with the radical shift in moral norms overnight that transformed “Thou shalt not kill” into “Thou shalt kill”, without questioning

Moral complexity is necessary in the face of evil

Perhaps the greatest irony of reality today is that the rhetoric of Germany’s “antiantisemitism” is being used to justify the mass slaughter of Palestinian people, while having the effect of actually increasing antisemitism and making Jewish people less safe everywhere.